The apology was a profound moment in the history of black and white relations in Australia. The grief and relief of generations of Indigenous people taken from their families by churches and agencies spoke powerfully to people watching the country turn a corner.

Rudd’s apology had many dimensions. Sorry for the personal hurt and degradation, regret too for the damage inflicted on indigenous culture and identity. People taken from their families were robbed not only of their loved ones, but also of their means of identification. Indigenous people belong to a people and a homeland. Removal broke the link, an act with profound implications that linger until this day.

Hosch thought of the people who had not lived to see the apology. She experienced, in those moments, the gaps in her own story – birth parents who had put her up for adoption at three weeks of age; another kind of personal dislocation, a lost cultural connection, an all too common story in Indigenous Australia. She thought of her daughter, the first blood relative she’s known. “I was so grateful to have the confidence that I was not going to have to have to fight to protect her from being removed from me,” she says. “That consciousness you have as a parent.”

But it was more than gratitude. There was a specific sense of obligation. “If it takes me my whole life to find my natural family, and repair that lost cultural connection, then I have a daughter who needs me to secure certain things for her,” Hosch says.

The story of Marley’s culture needs to take its place at the foundations of modern Australia. As far as Tanya Hosch is concerned, Rudd’s apology was just the start. “I feel like getting our constitution to tell the truth about who we are as a nation is the least my daughter deserves,” she says.

She pauses to look me in the eye. “And the least that your kids deserve too.”

Hosch couldn’t have known, sitting listening to Rudd apologise, that exactly five years later she’d be standing up at the National Press Club, making her debut on national television as the public face of the Recognise campaign. For the next two years it will be her job to convince Australia that constitutional reform matters.

Some simple facts make the case. The constitution neglects to reference the 40,000 years of Indigenous history before white settlement. Indigenous people were excluded from the drafting process at the time of federation. The only references in the document were discriminatory. The absence of recognition of Australia’s original inhabitants stems from the myth that Britain took possession of an empty continent. That myth sustained a century of exclusion and systemic discrimination.

All sides of politics accept the foundational injustice in principle, and for a period of time, they have wondered how to fix it. John Howard made an attempt in 1999 by proposing a new preamble to the constitution acknowledging the first Australians, but the proposal was rebuffed by voters at a referendum. Howard’s first effort looked half-hearted, the language chosen was contentious, the Coalition was divided, Indigenous leaders accused the prime minister of bad faith, and the preamble became mired in a political debate over whether Australia should become a republic. Neither the republic nor the preamble succeeded.

Gillard has declared the lack of constitutional acknowledgement an “unhealed wound that even now lies open at the heart of our national story”. The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, expressed it this way: “We have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul that Prime Minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago. We have to acknowledge that pre-1788, this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now, and until we have acknowledged that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.”

The dominant current view among politicians is that constitutional recognition should not go to another referendum until the community understands why we are having the debate. “A referendum should be held at a time when it has the most chance of success,” Julia Gillard said earlier this year. “I do believe the community is willing to embrace the justice of this campaign because Australians understand that Indigenous culture and history are a source of pride for us all. But I also believe that their goodwill needs to be galvanised.”

It’s a big moment of transition for a woman who has devoted her professional life to activism in the backroom. Until now she’s been a policy wonk, consultant and strategist. Hosch’s time behind the scenes has secured her a formidable network, and a bunch of rusted-on admirers. Make calls about Tanya Hosch and this is the general playback: a superb strategist, the only person to lead the Recognise campaign, one of the only emerging Indigenous leaders who can balance the imperative of having a vision, and seeing it through to detailed implementation. In this age of self-promotion, most people in Hosch’s position would grab the microphone first and think second.

Patrick Dodson, the man generally regarded as the father of reconciliation, has known Hosch for most of her adult life. He suggests part of the instinct to hold back reflects her consultative nature. She’s conscious of her obligations, she “doesn’t regurgitate a set of mantras but wants to engage in genuine dialogue”. If she’s walking a road which ends with her being the front person, she’s going to take her time walking it. She’s going to know every bend.

“Young people are conscious of the pressures, the lack of returns for your effort, the need to establish their own family’s financial security, the thanklessness of the task, in trying to be a universal leader, so they are less inclined to go into that space,” Dodson says. “If you are going to run up against criticism, the rise of social media has given everyone a platform who wants one and everyone is an expert despite the lack of credentials, so they are very rare people who will want to carry the burdens that come with that.”

There’s an act of commodification that goes with being a public figure. You have to deal with a media that cares nothing about you beyond what you can deliver in the moment. “You can go into this public domain,” Dodson says, “and be anointed a leader by the press, and then they will spit you out when they finish with you.”

Then there’s politics, a conflict business. “Indigenous politics can be nasty, personal, vicious really. Stepping up is a risk,” says Tim Goodwin, a Melbourne lawyer and emerging Indigenous leader who has known Hosch since he was 15. Lawyer Larissa Behrendt explains the risks further. “Tanya is never one to put herself at the front,” she says, “but she’s always instrumental in making things happen.” That level of steady achievement can create “some level of petty jealousy”.

“Her story of adoption and dislocation is a story in too many people’s backgrounds,” Behrendt says. “For me, Tanya’s identity has never been in question. But when someone of Tanya’s calibre has success, then the easiest way to tear them down is to cast aspersions. It’s a cheap trick people play when they’ve got nothing else to use. It’s the cheapest shot: who are you? Where’s your family from? It’s awful.”

Julia Gillard might get an interrogation about her empty fruitbowl, or about her oversized earlobes, but the gratuitous personal attack for Indigenous leaders often manifests around identity questions. It can be from rivals in the community, or self-appointed culture warriors sitting outside making pronouncements. The complexities of all that could be enough to sap anyone’s confidence, to keep a person not only consigned to the wings but crouching in the brace position under the desk.

“The time [people such as Patrick and Lowitja] have invested in me requires me to put aside my own misgivings and get on with it,” Hosch says. “I feel like that’s what we have to do, all of us, together.

“When I think about those more senior leaders who have been incredibility generous with me and invested a lot of time in me, the best thing I can do to to repay that is step up now.

“I feel like it’s the right time, and I think if not now, when, and if not us, who?”

“I was blessed to be raised in a family that is a model for the kind of nation I want Australia to be,” Hosch said. “A family where race isn’t a divide, but an enricher. A family that is proud of the many strands of its heritage, and particularly of our Indigenous heritage. A family that integrates the best of all of our traditions and cultures, and which has nurtured me to play a part in bringing about this big moment in the life of our nation.”

She was born to a white mother of Welsh origin, and her birth father is a Torres Strait Islander man. Her adoptive mother is white and her adoptive father Aboriginal. The adoption was never a secret. “There has always been openness about those things,” she says. Hosch came to her adoptive family after the death of her parents’ eldest child in a car accident at only 16. “There was a lot of grief and it was hard.” Home was “a safe place to come to because of the openly caring and sharing nature of it. My parents got married young. They’ve had a pretty tough life. But they’ve always worked really hard. There wasn’t a lot financially, but there was a lot of love and an enormous amount of stability.”

There was racism at school, and that dented the young woman’s confidence. Hosch finished her education at Enfield high school, “but only just”. Most adolescents struggle to assume their adult form, the process is often inelegant, but for Hosch the “who am I” questions were specific and painful. “I certainly grew up with a sense of there are things about who I am that I don’t understand,” she says. “I still experience a deep sense of loss about those things. I’ll continue to work on filling in those parts. But that is painful, that process. I can only do that in my own time.”

She didn’t go straight to university. “I think I thought that was something that very clever, born to rule people did. It did not occur to me that anyone could go.” She worked instead, at a women’s information switchboard in Adelaide. It was a feminist organisation. Colleagues encouraged her to go to university and study social work part-time. She did, and loved it.

Activism crept up, bit by bit. She entered the public sector and did a placement at the Human Rights Commission in Sydney just after the Bringing Them Home report on Aboriginal children stolen from their families was released in 1997. That report revealed the full extent to which forcible removals occurred in Australia over a century, and Hosch listened to the oral submissions, voices she would remember a decade later on the day Rudd apologised to the stolen generations.

She attended her first big national meeting – the Reconciliation Convention of 1997 – courtesy of her trade union, who sent her as a delegate. Dodson spoke at that conference. She nominates it as her transformational moment, where she resolved to be an activist, not a spectator. “I always had a desire to do good, I suppose, but I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen,” she recalls. “I distinctly remember [Dodson’s] closing address, him challenging everybody to think about what they can do to create a reconciled nation. I took it literally.”

Hosch progressed to opportunities to work in Indigenous policy, high-level public sector roles, including a job at the Reconciliation Council. “I think a lot of people back then would have found me stroppy and confrontational,” Hosch says of her early period. “I would argue the toss on everything, basically. I was worried about things not being strong enough in terms of the assertions being made.”

Behrendt was a pal in Canberra. She says: “We understood what we were going through, working as women at that level. Tanya was instrumental in bringing people together. She’s always understood the importance of peer support. She wanted camaraderie among our generation.”

Hosch says she and Glanville “want the same kind of change”. Glanville says Hosch is without doubt the best strategist working in Indigenous politics, a person of “driving commitment”, who can work a room better than anyone. But, he adds, “she has an incredible capacity to not back herself and run herself down”.

While Glanville wishes his mate would second-guess herself less, he concedes the doubt is actually her greatest strength, particularly for a campaign like Recognise which has to bring a lot of people together, across cultures and generations. Self doubt “makes her more considered, it makes her respectful of the relationships she’s built”.

Behrendt puts the same idea slightly more directly: “It’s the lack of raging personal ambition that makes her trustworthy.”

Becoming a mother, Glanville says, has given Hosch more skin in the game. I ask her about Marley. “She was only about five months old when we went to Canberra for the apology. I remember sitting there that day, with a young baby, and, um … there was so much emotion in that day. It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I really started to appreciate the anguish and pain. The tragedy of what people survived. And some people didn’t. So I thought about the comfort of knowing that in the midst of the celebration of the apology finally coming, that I could look at my daughter and know that she was part of me.”

Fred Chaney, a former Aboriginal affairs minister and Liberal senator who has been an activist in the Indigenous policy space throughout his long career, has known Hosch since her early 20s. He says she is simply delivering on potential that was obvious to everyone who knew her from her youth, but that he worries a little about the expectations that now swirl around her (“What will she have to do next, handstands off the Empire State Building?”). Still, his endorsement is simple and sincere. “The more people we have like Tanya, the more likely we are to have a reconciled Australia.”

Recognise can lay the groundwork, make the case, engage the community – but ultimately progress or otherwise depends on politics. Federal parliamentarians have the power to make or break this issue. Constitutional change requires bipartisanship. If Indigenous recognition becomes a point of political contention, then it’s over.

The issue looks calm and consensual now. Parliament has passed the Act of Recognition. Opposition to the idea is muted. But as we move towards resolution, two points of pushback are probable. Some Indigenous people believe recognition is far too modest a step, that Australia should be debating a treaty, or other means of achieving sovereignty. Other critics on the conservative side of the ledger will oppose the creep of the “rights agenda”. They will see recognition, and the campaigners for it, as wild-eyed radicals in sheep’s clothing, intent on using legal recognition as a foundation for future court actions. We saw these arguments promulgated during the land rights debates, and during the apology as well.

Hosch is well liked in Canberra, the place where she will need to extract the fineprint. Senior Coalition players are enormously respectful, including Mark Textor, one of Abbott’s key strategists. A “rare find” is how he describes her. “Constructive and determined,” notes Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin.

Hosch describes herself as a “restrained optimist” about the prospect of success. “I’m not typically glass half full. I’m not optimistic generally speaking, but certainly on constitutional recognition I am. I think the country is ready for this now and I don’t think we should squander that,” she says. “If we as a nation can come together in that double majority, which is very difficult to achieve, then we’ve arrived at a place where the majority of this nation isn’t just accepting of the need to end the exclusion, but is hopefully also celebrating how important it is that this country has first Australians who are still here, with a living, vibrant, diverse set of cultures and beliefs that are part of the fabric of the nation,” Hosch says.